By Stephen Stirling and S.P. Sullivan NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Police have the right to punch you if you're resisting arrest.
They have the right to tackle you if they think you might flee.
And they have the right to shoot you if they fear for their lives.
The single greatest authority granted a police officer is the right to harm another person, and most use it sparingly to protect themselves and the public.
But who's watching the ones who abuse their power? Who's making sure people of all colors, all communities and all backgrounds are treated equally? Who's tracking trends and stopping overly aggressive officers before someone needlessly gets hurt, costing taxpayers big money?
Nearly two decades ago, state officials envisioned a centralized system to track police force and flag bad policies and bad actors. Instead, paper records detailing tens of thousands of violent encounters between police and the public now collect dust in filing cabinets.
The Force Report, a 16-month investigation by NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, found New Jersey's system for tracking police force is broken, with no statewide collection or analysis of the data, little oversight by state officials and no standard practices among local departments.
In an unprecedented undertaking, the news organization filed 506 public records requests and collected 72,677 use-of-force reports. They covered every municipal police department and the State Police from 2012 through 2016, the most recent year of data available. The results are now available at nj.com/force. It is the most comprehensive statewide database of police force ever created and made public in the United States.
Among the findings:
- While using force is a normal and necessary part of policing, NJ Advance Media found glaring disparities across the state that warrant review. Ten percent of officers accounted for 38 percent of all uses of force. A total of 252 officers used force more than five times the state average, according to the database.
- Whenever police use force, the stakes are high. At least 9,281 people were injured by police from 2012 through 2016. At least 4,382 of those were serious enough that the subject was sent to the hospital, though reporting of hospitalization is inconsistent. At least 156 officers put at least one person in the hospital in each of the five years reviewed.
- Statewide, a black person was more than three times more likely to face police force than someone who is white. In Millville in South Jersey, black people faced police force at more than six times the rate of whites. In South Orange, it was nearly 10 times. In Lakewood, it was an astronomical 22 times.
- The system for reporting use-of-force by police is a mess. Different departments use different forms, making tracking difficult. Officers self-reported incidents, but thousands of reports were incomplete, illegible, lacking supervisory review or missing altogether. At least 62 times, forms were so sloppy the officers accidentally marked themselves as dead.
- New Jersey fails to monitor trends to flag officers who use disproportionately high amounts of force. The state recently implemented a new early warning system to identify potential problem officers but did not mandate tracking use-of-force trends as a criteria, which experts called a gaping hole in oversight.
"This is the sort of the analysis that should be done from the local to state level," said Rich Rivera, an expert on police practices and former West New York police officer. "It’s a watershed moment for policing in New Jersey."
Presented with the news organization's findings, state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal offered no defense of the current system, conceding it needed a complete overhaul and promising to make it happen.
"We should be using this as a tool to improve officer behavior, to hold problematic officers accountable for retraining and to prevent the next excessive use-of-force case," said Grewal, who was appointed by Gov. Phil Murphy in January as the state's top law enforcement official.
"You've obviously highlighted shortcomings in the system, and we're committed to fixing whatever shortcomings there are to ensure we have the best system here in New Jersey to collect this information and to review it," he said.
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All told, it’s impossible to know how many injuries, excessive force cases or costly lawsuits could have been prevented had the state collected and analyzed this data. But recent cases speak to how such scrutiny could have prevented possible wrongdoing.
In October, Millville officer Jeffrey Profitt was indicted on charges of official misconduct and accused of assaulting several suspects from 2014 through 2016. Profitt is also accused of falsifying records, including use-of-force reports. The officer, who has pleaded not guilty, averaged 7.2 uses of force per year from 2012 through 2016, almost nine times the statewide average, and ranked second among all Millville officers, with 36 total incidents.
Authorities in Millville declined to discuss Profitt's case, citing the pending criminal charges, but attributed their relatively high use-of-force rate to aggressive reporting policies.
No one has ever seen data like this in New Jersey. Not the attorney general, not county prosecutors and not local police departments. And that's because, though it was available for the taking, no one ever collected and digitized it as originally envisioned, rendering it nearly useless, current and former law enforcement officials told NJ Advance Media. Even Grewal himself, the former Bergen County prosecutor, conceded he never made use of it while he was in charge of the office because the data was such a mess.
“The bottom line is this information has been obtained and tracked by police departments and prosecutor’s offices and the Attorney General’s Office for years, but ... no one was actually paying attention to the statistics," Newark Police Director Anthony Ambrose said. "We all share responsibility that we weren’t paying attention to it."
This is not a database of police misconduct, and a high number of uses of force does not necessarily indicate wrongdoing. On average during the five years, police used force once about every 30 arrests, and the records underscore the dangers officers face on a regular basis.
They include stories of police stopping suicide attempts, helping autistic children in crisis and fending off attacks from people with guns, knives and even their teeth. Officers are spat upon. They have urine and feces thrown at them. Their dogs are attacked.
Mostly, these events — then and now — end peacefully. But it takes a toll. More than 6,500 officers suffered injuries over the five years analyzed, or about 3.5 per day statewide. And more than 1,000 officers suffered multiple injuries in the line of duty during that time, according to the database.
Over the next few weeks, NJ Advance Media will provide an unprecedented look inside police use of force, using data never available for analysis. We encourage you to visit the database at NJ.com/force and let us know if you see a story we should pursue. You can reach our team by sending an email to forcereport@njadvancemedia.com.
Here’s a closer look at the findings, so far:
New Jersey is comprised of 468 local police departments, and when you roll them together, they tend to apply force during about 3 percent of all arrests. That's in line with the generally accepted average across the U.S., though there's no definitive national data on police force.
Unfurl that bundle, though, and you start seeing red flags.
Every community is unique, and there are reasons use-of-force rates can vary. But our review found at least 20 police departments used force when making arrests at twice the statewide average, and it’s not just dense cities with high crime rates.
In the suburbs of Maplewood and Woodland Park, police use force at more than three times the state rate. The same is true in Shore towns from Long Branch to Atlantic City.
"It’s mentally overbearing to have to think about how to act around police around here all the time," said Felicia George, a 23-year-old from Maplewood who believes black people and young people are unfairly targeted in town. "And every time you have one of these negative interactions with police, it like reverberates through every cell of your being."
Maplewood Police Chief James DeVaul said he has cracked down on officers arresting and using force against young people because he believes it is unnecessary in most cases. DeVaul said the department's oversight process, which includes the chief personally reviewing files, would likely root out bias in how individual officers are using force.
Across New Jersey, 17,369 officers used some type of force at least four times from 2012 through 2016. Any expert will tell you it’s part of the job, but not on a daily, or even monthly, basis. In a given year, many officers in New Jersey never use force at all.
Our analysis found hundreds of officers used force with alarming frequency.
In Atlantic City, an officer filed 62 use-of-force forms during the five-year period, more than 15 times the state average. In Spotswood, an officer was involved in more than half of the department's 46 uses of force over that same period. In Camden, an officer reported injuring 27 people.
Scores of other officers fell well outside the state’s norms.
Just one example: Police officers used pepper spray during about 7 percent of use-of-force incidents in New Jersey from 2012 through 2016. It's unusual for an officer to use pepper spray more than once in the five-year span. But one officer in Trenton used it 22 times, in all but three of his force reports.
An officer in Bloomfield filed 15 force reports over the five years, a number that probably wouldn't normally set off alarms. But all of the subjects were black, an anomaly in a town where blacks account for 16 percent of the population and less than half of all arrests.
"We’ve been saying this for years but nobody wanted to touch it," Lawrence Hamm, who runs the Newark-based social justice group People’s Organization for Progress, said of racial disparities in how police applied force. "I think because they knew if they opened this can of worms it would have profound ramifications."
Ablack person was three times more likely to be subjected to police force in New Jersey than someone who was white during the five-year period. They were more than twice as likely to be shot, more likely to be pepper sprayed and more likely to be injured or hospitalized by police.
No matter how you parse it, the use of force by police in New Jersey is not equal.
"This is what I’ve known and lived for years," said Milton Hinton, the former president of the Gloucester County chapter of the NAACP.
NJ Advance Media consulted with independent statisticians and analyzed the use-of-force data to present the most complete and accurate picture of how force was used along racial lines.
The inequality crops up again and again.
Strictly comparing the number of uses of force by race against the racial makeup of the state’s population, NJ Advance Media found 214 New Jersey cities and towns where black people were more than twice as likely as white people to have force used against them.
(The population was adjusted to include only people between the ages of 10 and 64 to prevent very young and old people who infrequently face force from skewing the calculations.)
Such calculations, however, are criticized because black people are arrested at higher rates than white people. But studies such as the Stanford Open Policing Project found black and Hispanic people are disproportionately subjected to detention and arrest during traffic stops and searches.
From 2012 through 2016, black people in New Jersey accounted for about 38 percent of arrests, yet they make up only about 14 percent of the adjusted state population.
Even when accounting for the fact that black people are arrested at a higher rate, they are still subjected to force at unequal rates when arrested. There were 173 local jurisdictions where a black person who was arrested was more likely to have force used against them than a white person being arrested. (That's excluding departments with fewer than 25 uses of force.)
In 30 of those jurisdictions, black people were twice as likely to face police force. In Paterson, a black person being arrested was 5.6 times more likely to have force used against them.
Black people were also more likely to face every type of force police use except for the most basic kind, known as a compliance hold or restraint hold. That's despite the fact that, according to the data, black people were less likely to threaten police verbally or physically during a use-of-force incident.
Grewal, the attorney general, said the racial disparities were “troubling” but declined to comment further, saying he needed to review the data in detail.
"We need accountability and transparency," said Zellie Thomas, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Paterson. "A lot of people aren't even aware of what's going on because it doesn't make the media. It's not always about someone having to get shot and killed."
Worse yet, the numbers showing how often white people face force are probably inflated because of who wasn’t being properly counted: Hispanic people. According to the data, Hispanic people accounted for 9 percent of use-of-force incidents in the five-year period.
They account for 21 percent of the adjusted population.
While “Hispanic” is not a race, it is often recorded alongside race on many government forms. Police chiefs in towns that don’t track ethnicity say they’re simply using the templates they were given by the Attorney General’s Office or their county prosecutors.
Lakewood is one of the few towns in New Jersey that has a formal system for reporting force use against its Hispanic population. The Ocean County town is 21 percent Hispanic by the adjusted population, but Hispanics accounted for about 30 percent of the uses of force from 2012 through 2016.
Lakewood Police Chief Gregory Meyer said the town began tracking the data after seeing the New Jersey State Police come under federal monitoring for racial profiling.
“We wanted to always have numbers to compare if we were challenged on anything,” Meyer said. “That's just how we do business.”
Police in New Jersey reported injuring more than 21 percent of the people they arrested from 2012 through 2016, according to the database. While their reports do not indicate the severity of the harm caused, injuries were far more common in some police departments.
Piscataway and Wildwood Crest each reported injuries in more than half of the incidents of force they reported. Officers in Burlington City reported injuring 41 of the 100 subjects who they used force against in the five-year period. And in Cherry Hill, 57 percent of force reports indicated the subject was hospitalized after the encounter.
At the officer level, injury statistics are far more glaring.
According to the data, 76 officers reported injuring at least half of those they used force against. (This excludes any officer who had fewer than 10 uses of force.) Officers in Paterson, Stafford, Brick and Trenton reported injuring subjects more than 80 percent of the time. And at least five New Jersey State Police troopers reported injuring every person they used force against.
Beyond the effects injuries can have on people's lives, they also can come with hefty price tags for taxpayers. An NJ Advance Media review of media reports and court records found that, on average, excessive force lawsuits cost New Jersey taxpayers millions of dollars every year.
"I'd rather spend the money now instead of pay later in a lawsuit," said Howell Police Chief Andrew Kudrick, who beefed up his own internal affairs unit three years ago to improve training and oversight of use of force and other issues.
[Read stories of people who say they were victims of excessive force]
In March, Grewal, the state attorney general, announced a major overhaul of the state's oversight of police, requiring all departments to implement "early warning systems" to identify potentially problematic officers for intervention, training and, if necessary, discipline.
The system requires departments to monitor their rank and file for 14 various red flags such as misconduct, lawsuits, domestic abuse and drunken driving. But it didn't require that they establish any measure for use of force, one of the most fundamental powers granted to police officers.
Only instances ruled excessive by a court or an internal investigation, a process that can take months or years, must be considered. Experts said that falls well short of what major police departments use across the country, and fails to provide the kind of "early warning" that was intended.
In both New York City and Chicago, cases that involve higher levels of force — including a baton, Taser or firearm — receive extra scrutiny.
If New Jersey had mandated New York City’s system, 9,955 officers would have had at least one incident reviewed from 2012 through 2016. If the state used Chicago’s system, which also flags uses of pepper spray for review, that number jumps to 10,649, or about 61 percent of all officers who filed at least one report.
In Los Angeles, the department uses a comprehensive early warning system that includes use of force among its 14 metrics and compares officers to each other to identify outliers. If one officer uses force significantly more often than his or her peers, supervisors are automatically notified.
Under that system, more than 1,200 officers would have been flagged in New Jersey based on use of force alone.
Some departments in the state took it upon themselves to monitor use of force, including the State Police and in towns such as Bloomfield and Glassboro. Salem, New Jersey's smallest county by population, requires its local departments to review any officer who uses force twice in a given year.
But it’s impossible to know how many officers have come under scrutiny because internal affairs records are kept secret.
[Read more about how N.J.'s system for tracking force broke down]
There's more in the data we're still unwrapping. Here are a few tidbits:
Several departments said their use-of-force rates appeared inflated because they frequently deal with emotionally disturbed people. Increasingly, officers are called for welfare checks, or to get an emotionally disturbed patient into an ambulance or talk a suicidal person off the ledge.
They are tense situations and ones that require care. There’s special training to protect everyone involved. And the use of force must be carefully controlled. Yet there’s no formal tracking of these encounters, making it impossible to conduct an analysis of how often force is used.
“Right now police don’t get adequate training in terms of (emotionally disturbed persons). And undoubtedly, training would reduce the fatality rate,” said Matthew Johnson, an associate professor of criminal psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But it’s difficult to dictate training if you don’t know the extent of the issue.”
***
Police use of force is self-reported, and some departments could be considered outliers for how little they report using it. Jersey City, for example, reports its officers using force at a rate lower than 345 other police departments, despite having one of the higher violent crime rates in the state.
James Shea, the city's director of public safety, acknowledged the department failed to provide all use-of-force forms in response to NJ Advance Media's public records request. Shea said some use-of-force reports had been misfiled during the department’s shift from a paper system to a computerized one, he said.
But he was unable to say how many were missing, where they were or if they existed at all. He said the department had launched an internal investigation to find the missing forms.
Jersey City's records did not include the arrest of Tevin Henry, who said he was detained and beaten by police in 2012 and later received $14,500 to settle a police brutality lawsuit.
Jersey City is hardly alone in this regard.
In Maplewood, 10 officers were disciplined and the police chief ousted after video surfaced of cops punching and kicking black teens in a July 2016 incident. But you'd never know about the melee from looking at the use-of-force reports, because it wasn't recorded.
Maplewood Police Chief James DeVaul, promoted in the aftermath of the controversy, confirmed no forms were filed but declined to comment further, citing an ongoing internal affairs case that could lead to more charges.
In Millville, several of the use-of-force reports pertaining to the officer under indictment on allegations of brutalizing suspects, Jeffrey Profitt, were also missing from the files turned over by the city in response to NJ Advance Media's records request.
***
Buried in the stacks of paper, you’ll also find the stranger sides of policing.
A Jersey City man who resisted arrest by hiding in a dog house. A particularly persistent flock of geese in Sayreville that could only be scared off with gunfire. An unruly suspect wielding a six-pack as a weapon. And that’s just scratching the surface.
We want your help in finding more stories for The Force Report. Explore the most comprehensive statewide database of police use of force in the U.S., available now at nj.com/force. Search to see how often police in your local department use force, or check out which individual officers use the most force.
Let us know if you see trends or individuals that merit additional scrutiny. You can reach our team directly at forcereport@njadvancemedia.com.
We are continuing to make this dataset better. The numbers in this story were last updated Jan. 8, 2019. See the changes we've made here.
Read more from The Force Report:
- How N.J.'s system for stopping potentially abusive cops broke down
- Search your town and local police officers to see how much force they use
- They claimed they were victims of police brutality. Read their stories.
- Everything you need to know about how police use force, from A-Z
- See how often police in every N.J. town punch, kick or use other force (MAP)
- Frequently Asked Questions about The Force Report
- How we built the largest database of police force in N.J. history
Staff writers Carla Astudillo, Craig McCarthy, Blake Nelson, Erin Petenko and Disha Raychaudhuri contributed to this report.
The Force Report is a continuing investigation of police use of force in New Jersey. Read more from the series or search your local police department and officers in the full the database.